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5 Tips to Help Balance Your Responsibilities in College

It can be so easy to fall behind on your to-do list and feel like you’ll never be able to catch up or get ahead of it. Trying to balance classes, homework, jobs, internships, and everything else life throws your way can seem like a never ending cycle. But making an effort to follow these steps can help to stay ahead of those to-do lists and help to bring more balance to your schedule.

1. Set Realistic Goals
Setting goals not only helps you to visualize what you need to get done, but it helps to organize and strive to accomplish these responsibilities! However, knowing the difference from realistic goals and unrealistic goals is important. Sitting down on Sunday night and writing down 5 goals for the week is a great place to start. They can be as a small as getting the first half of that paper due next week done by Wednesday. Another goal could be to spend 2 hours working on and updating your LinkedIn profile that you have been putting off for weeks. Having goals set will help you to prioritize and accomplish them.

2. Learn to Study Effectively
Don’t be the person that puts off studying until the day before the exam. Not only does this cause more stress for you in the long run, but cramming will not help you to perform as well as you could if you had been spreading out your studying. Creating a study schedule and dedicating an hour or so each day leading up to the exam will help so much more in the long run. Figure out what style of studying best works for you and do whatever you can to achieve that.

3. Learn to Better Manage Your Time- Stop Procrastinating!
Everyone knows that procrastinating only hurts us in the long run. So why do we keep doing it? Develop a system that best works for you to help manage your time. Whether that be Google reminders set up, writing things down in a planner, making more to-do lists, you name it! Also know what is worth your time. It is important to make sure that what you are spending your time on, you are actually benefiting from. If something is taking up a large amount of your time and your aren’t reaping the benefits, then it might be time to decide if it is worth your time.

4. Set Priorities and Let Things Go
It can be so easy to become extremely overwhelmed rather than to take control and organize all of our responsibilities that we need to get done. College is filled with mistakes and learning experiences. But it is important that from our mistakes we can move forward and let things go. If we let something slip, don’t sweat it. Learn from it and move on. Start making to-do lists, even if it isn’t something you would normally do and let yourself experience how amazing it feels to cross off each item and complete the list.

5. Explore Your Options and Get Help!
It is so important to explore your options and to know what is available to you. Especially here at Hope we have so many resources right at our fingertips that we won’t always have. Feeling stressed about some of your classes? Go to the Academic Success Center or attend your class’ study session. Stressed about what your major should be? Can’t find an internship? Need help with last minute interview prep or looking over your resume? Come to the Boerigter Center for Calling and Career! There are so many resources we have all around us, it is up to us to utilize them.